Turkey cave rescue: American explorer trapped in Morca cave carried 300 metres closer to escape as rescue continues – latest

Rescue teams in Turkey have successfully carried an American researcher up from the depth of a cave at 3,410 feet (1,040m) to the 2,300 feet (700m) mark where he will rest at a base camp before they continue the taxing journey to the surface.

“Mark [Dickey] was delivered to the campsite at -700 meters as of 03:24 local time (GMT+3). At this stage, he will set out again after resting and having the necessary treatments,” the Speleological Federation of Turkey wrote on its official account on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Rescue teams from Italy, Turkey, Bulgaria Hungary, Poland and Croatia have been placed throughout different checkpoints in the cave as the operation to evacuate Mark Dickey

Here are some of the latest images of the rescue:

Tulga Sener, the head of the rescue commission medical unit, told Reuters that Mr Dickey’s health condition was stable and his vital signs normal, adding that three doctors would attend to him on his way up.

It is believed that Mr Dickey will have to take significant rest at frequent points on the way out.

Explosives will need to be used to expand some of the more narrow points of the cave to allow safe passage said Recep Salci, the head of search and rescue for AFAD, with the aim of bringing Mr Dickey up on a stretcher.

Rescuers will use a “security belt” system to lift him through the cave’s narrowest openings.

“Our aim is to bring him out and to have him hospitalised as soon as possible,” Mr Salci said.

“This is a vertical cave with a lot of water,” Agnes Berentes, a photographer with Mark Dickey on the mission, told Reuters.

“We have to use our vertical rope techniques. And it has a lot of narrow passages. This will be the hardest part of the areas of the rescue,” she said.

The trapped explorer Mark Dickey’s condition is “stable but fragile,” Carl Heitmeyer, acting public information officer for the New Jersey Initial Response Team, said in an emailed statement.

The cave, difficult, deep and muddy, is “very much eating up rescuers’ gear,” he added, meaning that an already arduous rescue is taking time.

Rescuers will have the trapped explorer Mark Dickey out “within several days,” Mersin Governor Ali Hamza Pehlivan has said.

Mr Dickey, 40, was on an international exploration mission in the Morca cave in Mersin province’s Taurus mountains when he began suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding at a depth of 1,040 metres (3,400ft)

More than 150 rescuers from Turkey and other nations have been working to save him from the country’s third deepest cave.

“Depending on the developments at the stations in between, hopefully the evacuation will have been completed within several days,” Mr Pehlivan told reporters.

Mark Dickey recorded a video message that was released by Turkish authorities late on Thursday.

“Hi, I’m Mark Dickey from nearly a thousand metres,” Mr Dickey said in the message, dressed in a red puffer jacket and using a headlamp.

“As you can see, I’m up, I’m alert, I’m talking. But I’m not healed on the inside yet, so I’m going to need a lot of help to get out of here,” he added.

“The caving world is a really tight-knit group, and it’s amazing to see how many people have responded on the surface,” Mr Dickey said in the video. “I do know that the quick response of the Turkish government to get the medical supplies that I need, in my opinion, saved my life.

“I was very close to the edge.”

Tulga Sener, the head of the rescue commission medical unit, told Reuters that Mr Dickey’s health condition was stable and his vital signs normal, adding that three doctors would attend to him on his way up.

It is believed that Mr Dickey will have to take significant rest at frequent points on the way out.

Explosives will need to be used to expand some of the more narrow points of the cave to allow safe passage said Recep Salci, the head of search and rescue for AFAD, with the aim of bringing Mr Dickey up on a stretcher.

Rescuers will use a “security belt” system to lift him through the cave’s narrowest openings.

“Our aim is to bring him out and to have him hospitalised as soon as possible,” Mr Salci said.

Yusuf Ogrenecek, of the Speleological Federation of Turkey, told the Associated Press that one of the most difficult tasks of cave rescue operations is widening the narrow cave passages to allow stretcher lines to pass through at low depths.

“Stretcher lines are labour intensive and require experienced cave rescuers working long hours,” Mr Ogrenecek said, adding that other difficult factors range from navigating through mud and water at low temperatures to the psychological toll of staying inside a cave for long periods of time.

Earlier on Saturday, The New York Times reported rescuers were using explosives to widen parts of the narrow Morca cave so that Mr Dickey can be safely extracted via a stretcher.

In Rome, Federico Catania, the spokesman for Italy’s National Alpine and Speleological Rescue, described the cave as one of the deepest in the world.

“The cave is made up of many vertical shafts, so many sections that are extremely vertical with few horizontal sections where (the) rescuers are setting up temporary camps,” he said.